Ethics Commission tackles campaign finance duplicates

AUSTIN — The Texas Ethics Commission is working to fix a quirk with its website that causes it in many cases to spit out duplicate contributions when prompted for an advanced campaign finance report query.

It’s not the type of tech glitch that hovers large on most radars — but it is important for those who regularly comb through campaign finance data on the commission’s site.

Just ask Wendy Davis’ gubernatorial campaign, which was snakebitten last month by duplicate data when it attacked Attorney General Greg Abbott with bad figures on payday lender contributions. After getting called out by the San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle for using fuzzy math, the Davis camp released new figures that were still tainted and then eventually issued a press release admitting fault.

The commission apparently took notice.

At a hearing this week, chairman Jim Clancy did not mention the Davis goof by name but did cite a campaign attack that recently misfired because of duplicate data produced by the commission’s site.

“We give those search tools to the public,” Clancy said. “We don’t want to make it a misleading tool.”

So what’s the problem?

Let’s say you’re searching for all the contributions Abbott received in 2013. You plug that query into the ethics commission site and decide on whether it should be delivered via a spreadsheet or in an HTML list.

Either way, the search will produce a string of results with duplicate donors: money from the same person, in the same amount and on the same date.

Just like this:

The best way to avoid dupes is to compare the data produced on the site to the actual campaign finance filing. An extensive scrub of the data in Excel also is a good way to root out duplicates.

Clancy said that “drilling down” into the actual reports would give folks the answers they’re looking for on duplicates, but he also stressed that “at the same it’s not plainly obvious to the general public.”

Why does this happen?

The commission says the origin of the duplicate data is simple enough to trace: turns out that all advanced queries pull up and list every single contribution from every report that a candidate filed in the requested time frame.

That includes special campaign finance reports filed at specific periods before an election, reports filed during legislative special sessions and reports that correct or amend a previously filed report. Some of those reporting periods tend to overlap and, as a result, so do the contributions, prompting the duplicates.

What’s the fix?

The commission says it’s working to have all amended reports replace the original campaign finance reports to avoid confusion and duplicates on that end. It’s also trying to give users the search functionality — via a check box – to exclude some of the special reports that overlap with other campaign finance filings.

Clancy suggested that the new check box be labeled “exclude duplicates.”

For now, the commission has posted a warning label of sorts so that folks can be on the look out.

“Contributions or expenditures disclosed in special pre-election reports (formerly telegram reports) and special session reports are also required to be disclosed in subsequent report(s), which may explain why a contribution appears multiple times in the query results.”